"Dirty Pillows"

Ok, this I just had to laugh my ass off at.

Take a look at this picture:

Here’s the story. The above is a class picture of a seven year old girl. Her mother is throwing a major shit-fit and threatening to sue everyone in sight because she believes that this pic was ‘tampered with’ to give her seven year old daughter ‘cleavage’.

Ok, before I get technical, isn’t this the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard? Why would a professional photographer tamper with this picture and send the ‘edited’ version to the family?

What has he got to gain? The reputation of a pervert? A slight chuckle that could effectively close his business?

No.

I’ll tell you what happened. The mother saw the picture, and before anything else, she heard ‘Cha-Ching!’ and decided she could exploit a photographic oddity to grab money from an honest, hard-working photographer.

Ok, now for the technical part. I’ll explain exactly what has happened in this picture.

In short…the ‘fill’ flash didn’t go off.

When you’re taking a portrait shot, you don’t want any hard shadows on the face at all. It looks ugly. What you do is light the subject from both sides (usually above and to the side), and then use a third flash that ‘hits’ the subject head on.

So your subject is lit from both sides, and the front…meaning there’s nowhere for a shadow to be created.

Now look at the picture. The light is striking the girl from the top left and top right, and the collar of her shirt is creating a shadow. In the center, where the two shadows meet, you get an area of deeper shadow.

In short, it looks like cleavage. If the third flash from the front had fired, it would have obliterated the shadow.

There, if you actually look at the picture and think about it, it’s obvious what happened.

Of course, that way the only thing you get out of it is a second picture with the lighting fixed…you don’t get to demand a few million in ‘damages’, because some pervert photographer purposefully gave your daughter boobs.

I look forward to hearing about the court case.